This book begins with a quick orientation to the CorelDraw user interface and--with the help of the clip art library--a tutorial on CorelDraw's tools for manipulating existing images. This tutorial covers zooming, layers, groups, and elementary file operations.
McClelland turns his attention to creating original artwork with CorelDraw, documenting the software's remaining tools in the process. He covers simple shapes and free-form lines, as well as colors, color gradients, clones, and all sorts of transformations. To demonstrate the tools, he employs an easily drawn, goofy-looking frog.
CorelDraw gets plenty of use as a text styler, so CorelDraw 9 for Dummies includes ample information on cool text tricks, including advanced typography, path fitting, and distortions.
Before wrapping up with coverage of raster editing using Corel PhotoPaint, the author elaborates on CorelDraw as a desktop publishing program. During the discussion, he creates master pages and enlists tiling as a means of printing large drawings on multiple pages. McClelland also reveals CorelDraw's ability to export drawings in Web-compatible formats. --David Wall